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11-02-2009, 03:10 AM
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The debate over gun control is so fractious in part because it's a clash of worldviews. Both camps make assertions that implicitly denigrate the others' fundamental assumptions, and nothing makes someone quite as defensive as being told that his apprehension of the world is flawed. Calling someone a paranoid gun nut or a blissninny on top of that is just just icing on the cake.
As symmetrical as this situation might seem, it's not. Two positions, diametrically opposed about a point of fact, can't both be correct. More often then not, it's the truisms espoused by the anti-gun side of things that come up on the wrong side of this asymmetry. These false truisms are not peculiar to people who are virulently anti-gun, but are common, aphoristic statements about the world that are widely shared by many, but utterly incorrect.
Violence never solves anything.
It's not often that an assertion is utterly incorrect in both fact and principle, and rarer still that it's also widely accepted as truth despite this. Maybe having this statement drilled into us since before Kindergarten allows it to survive unquestioned in the face of repeated contradiction through twelve years of history classes.
The lesson, repeatedly reinforced through all of human existence, is that violence is a really effective way of getting what one wants. It's a method universally opposed by the victim, often undone after the fact, and with severe negative side effects--but it works often and easily enough to be the preferred choice of the malicious and power-hungry in every era.
But violence isn't just a tool for bad people: It's the reluctant choice of good people left with no other option than to allow aggression against themselves or those for whom they care. Those people would agree that violence wasn't their preferred solution and that it exacted costs unique to the use of violence. No matter who uses it and why, though, violence does solve problems.
What most people mean is that violence may solve problems, but creates more and greater problems in the process. Or that violence solves problems, but the act of violence is itself a problem that is greater than the problem it solves. I've actually heard that last one and was astonished and awestruck at a piece of reasoning that managed to be both an example of circular reasoning and a paradox; the circular reasoning is that violence never solves anything because any solution involving violence is not a solution at all; the paradox comes in because the circular reasoning requires a violent solution to actually be a solution in order to not be a solution.
Semantics aside, the crux of the matter isn't whether you believe that violence is or isn't a solution, but whether someone who is willing to use violence considers you a problem that needs to be solved. As long as such people exist, violence will solve a problem; the only question exists whether the problem solved will be your problem or his.
The world would be a better place without guns or weapons.
The fallacy of this statement has been already been addressed really well here (http://www.nationalreview.com/kopel/kopel120501.shtml) among other editorials: Advances in weaponry have always acted to minimize the advantages of strength, training, and numbers; as with any technology, weaponry aims to do more with less.
And one very important side-effect of this factor is that as the ease of using firearms has improved, the financial factor of warfare has increased in importance. The battlefield prowess of highly-trained aristocratic warriors couldn't stand against massed peasant archers, and musketeers required less training yet. This was the start of a trend that changed the winners of wars from the societies that are the most martial, to the ones that are the most productive, prosperous, and free.
On a smaller scale, firearms have always provided a disproportionate advantage to those at a disadvantage where physical violence is concerned. The mechanical and chemical mechanisms of firearms, as well as their ease of use, remove physical strength or rigorous training as factors in one's ability to do harm to another. Though this may provide malicious or undisciplined people the ability to do great harm, it also empowers the meek and weak who want to avoid being harmed but who lack the physical means or training time required to achieve this without guns.
Civilization could only hold together if at least 95% of the people in it are fundamentally good and honest, and given that guns help good people more than they help bad people, the advantages of guns will always outweigh the disadvantages.
Those who claim guns' influence on civilization is entirely negative are fixating on the negative effects of guns while taking for granted the benefits they already provide.
Firearms are uncivilized.
This position is not one of philosophy, but aesthetics. It focuses on the affects of what one considers civilization, not the requisite underpinnings. The basic premise is sound and universally agreeable, though: A civilized society will be distinguished by eschewing violence.
But just as you can take the tiger out of the jungle, but not the jungle out of the tiger, removing the means of violence from people does not make them nonviolent. Conversely, when people are truly nonviolent, it won't matter how many weapons they have because the owners of those weapons wouldn't dream of misusing them. To claim that the presence or absence of weaponry is itself a significant factor in the measure of civilization is to imply that the interior of a prison is more civilized than the outside.
Or it could be that those who see firearms and civilization in oppositional roles see them as a blocking element preventing the advance of civilization. This assumes that absent a single means of doing violence, people would abandon violence, or that specific advances in civilization are individually blocked by widespread ownership of arms. This then raises the question of what civilizing actions could be expected to result in a statistically significant outburst of armed insurrection--and whether something could be considered civilization if it is enacted against the will of the people being civilized.
The last posit illustrates what's probably the real shortcoming of using civilization as a metric: Like the term "fascist," the common use of "civilization" has lost any meaning beyond an objective-sounding term to communicate approval or disapproval.
The debate over gun control is so fractious in part because it's a clash of worldviews. Both camps make assertions that implicitly denigrate the others' fundamental assumptions, and nothing makes someone quite as defensive as being told that his apprehension of the world is flawed. Calling someone a paranoid gun nut or a blissninny on top of that is just just icing on the cake.
As symmetrical as this situation might seem, it's not. Two positions, diametrically opposed about a point of fact, can't both be correct. More often then not, it's the truisms espoused by the anti-gun side of things that come up on the wrong side of this asymmetry. These false truisms are not peculiar to people who are virulently anti-gun, but are common, aphoristic statements about the world that are widely shared by many, but utterly incorrect.
Violence never solves anything.
It's not often that an assertion is utterly incorrect in both fact and principle, and rarer still that it's also widely accepted as truth despite this. Maybe having this statement drilled into us since before Kindergarten allows it to survive unquestioned in the face of repeated contradiction through twelve years of history classes.
The lesson, repeatedly reinforced through all of human existence, is that violence is a really effective way of getting what one wants. It's a method universally opposed by the victim, often undone after the fact, and with severe negative side effects--but it works often and easily enough to be the preferred choice of the malicious and power-hungry in every era.
But violence isn't just a tool for bad people: It's the reluctant choice of good people left with no other option than to allow aggression against themselves or those for whom they care. Those people would agree that violence wasn't their preferred solution and that it exacted costs unique to the use of violence. No matter who uses it and why, though, violence does solve problems.
What most people mean is that violence may solve problems, but creates more and greater problems in the process. Or that violence solves problems, but the act of violence is itself a problem that is greater than the problem it solves. I've actually heard that last one and was astonished and awestruck at a piece of reasoning that managed to be both an example of circular reasoning and a paradox; the circular reasoning is that violence never solves anything because any solution involving violence is not a solution at all; the paradox comes in because the circular reasoning requires a violent solution to actually be a solution in order to not be a solution.
Semantics aside, the crux of the matter isn't whether you believe that violence is or isn't a solution, but whether someone who is willing to use violence considers you a problem that needs to be solved. As long as such people exist, violence will solve a problem; the only question exists whether the problem solved will be your problem or his.
The world would be a better place without guns or weapons.
The fallacy of this statement has been already been addressed really well here (http://www.nationalreview.com/kopel/kopel120501.shtml) among other editorials: Advances in weaponry have always acted to minimize the advantages of strength, training, and numbers; as with any technology, weaponry aims to do more with less.
And one very important side-effect of this factor is that as the ease of using firearms has improved, the financial factor of warfare has increased in importance. The battlefield prowess of highly-trained aristocratic warriors couldn't stand against massed peasant archers, and musketeers required less training yet. This was the start of a trend that changed the winners of wars from the societies that are the most martial, to the ones that are the most productive, prosperous, and free.
On a smaller scale, firearms have always provided a disproportionate advantage to those at a disadvantage where physical violence is concerned. The mechanical and chemical mechanisms of firearms, as well as their ease of use, remove physical strength or rigorous training as factors in one's ability to do harm to another. Though this may provide malicious or undisciplined people the ability to do great harm, it also empowers the meek and weak who want to avoid being harmed but who lack the physical means or training time required to achieve this without guns.
Civilization could only hold together if at least 95% of the people in it are fundamentally good and honest, and given that guns help good people more than they help bad people, the advantages of guns will always outweigh the disadvantages.
Those who claim guns' influence on civilization is entirely negative are fixating on the negative effects of guns while taking for granted the benefits they already provide.
Firearms are uncivilized.
This position is not one of philosophy, but aesthetics. It focuses on the affects of what one considers civilization, not the requisite underpinnings. The basic premise is sound and universally agreeable, though: A civilized society will be distinguished by eschewing violence.
But just as you can take the tiger out of the jungle, but not the jungle out of the tiger, removing the means of violence from people does not make them nonviolent. Conversely, when people are truly nonviolent, it won't matter how many weapons they have because the owners of those weapons wouldn't dream of misusing them. To claim that the presence or absence of weaponry is itself a significant factor in the measure of civilization is to imply that the interior of a prison is more civilized than the outside.
Or it could be that those who see firearms and civilization in oppositional roles see them as a blocking element preventing the advance of civilization. This assumes that absent a single means of doing violence, people would abandon violence, or that specific advances in civilization are individually blocked by widespread ownership of arms. This then raises the question of what civilizing actions could be expected to result in a statistically significant outburst of armed insurrection--and whether something could be considered civilization if it is enacted against the will of the people being civilized.
The last posit illustrates what's probably the real shortcoming of using civilization as a metric: Like the term "fascist," the common use of "civilization" has lost any meaning beyond an objective-sounding term to communicate approval or disapproval.